Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of file systems, and, more particularly, to clustered file systems.
File systems employ different techniques to ensure the consistency of the file system in the event of a system crash. One approach is for the file system to always write modified data to new locations on disk in a bottom-up order every few seconds. These views are called consistency snapshots. After a system crash, the file system starts with the top of the last consistency snapshot of the file system which is guaranteed to be consistent. The file system uses checksums so that data corruption can be reported to the user if the data at a given location does not match its expected checksum.